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Last week, the 12th edition of Russia’s Top50 list of the most powerful high performance computing systems was released at the annual Parallel Computing Technologies international conference. The list is ranked according to Linpack benchmark results and provides an important tool for tracking usage trends in HPC in Russia.

The fastest supercomputer on the Top50 is enabled by 40Gb/s InfiniBand with peak performance of 414 teraflops. More importantly, it is clear that InfiniBand is dominating the list as the most-used interconnect solution, connecting 37 systems - including the top three, and seven of the Top10.

According to the Linpack benchmark results, InfiniBand demonstrates up to 92 percent efficiency; InfiniBand’s high system efficiency and utilization allow users to maximize their return-on-investment for their HPC server and storage infrastructure. Nearly three quarters of the list - represented by leading research laboratories, universities, industrial companies and banks in Russia - rely on industry-leading InfiniBand solutions to provide the highest in bandwidth, efficiency, scalability and application performance.

Highlights of InfiniBand usage on the April 2010 Russian TOP50 list include:

InfiniBand connects 74 percent of the Top50, including seven of the Top10 most prestigious positions (#1, #2, #3, #6, #8, #9 and #10)

InfiniBand provides world-leading system utilization, up to 92 percent efficiency as measured by the Linpack benchmark

The list showed a sharp increase in the aggregated performance - the total peak performance of the list exceeded 1PFlops to reach 1152.9TFlops, an increase of 120 percent compared to the September 2009 list - highlighting the increasing demand for higher performance

Ethernet connects only 14 percent of the list (seven systems) and there were no 10GigE clusters

Proprietary clustering interconnects declined 40 percent to connect only three systems on the list

I look forward to seeing the results of the Top500 in June at the International Supercomputing Conference. I will be attending the conference, as will many of our IBTA colleagues, and I look forward to seeing all of our HPC friends in Germany.